Sunday, April 22, 2018

"Nature, invoked at the beginning against convention, has itself become a convention."

"Rights are detatched from nature and thus without any anchor. They multiply and proliferate in a chaotic profusion. As originally understood, the rights of man were based on a distinction: on the one hand, the realm of rights where humanity as such received its due, where no distinction between men applied; on the other, the rest of life, in which differences among men were played out. But this distinction is effaced along with the idea of nature. If rights are no longer based on nature, then there is no reason to limit them...."...Nature, invoked at the beginning against convention, has itself become a convention." Philippe Bénéton, Equality by default: an essay on modernity as confinement, trans. Ralph C. Hancock (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2004), 12-13.